A Lonely Death in a Seattle Rooming House
A woman living in poverty is found dead in a prayerful posture, leaving behind only a small dog and unpaid rent.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A woman of the town was found dead in room 15 of the Concomly hotel this evening at 8 o'clock. Heart failure was the cause of death. At 10 in the morning she went to breakfast, but could eat nothing, and at 9 in the evening William Lombardini, at the suggestion of the other women, climbed over the transom and saw that the woman was kneeling beside the bed with her chin resting on it and her arms stretched across the bed and clasped together as though in prayer. As he went toward the kneeling figure, a little dog that was curled in her lap and under her right arm barked furiously at him. Finding the face cold, he sent for Coroner Masten, who pronounced death due to heart failure. She had apparently crawled out of bed in agony and fallen in an attitude of prayer to die. The remains were taken to Butterworth's morgue. The woman had been here nine months, was a native of Whitechapel, and was a hard drinker. She only had 51 cents in money and had not paid her rent since January 30, and is believed to have been in deep poverty.
“She had apparently crawled out of bed in agony and fallen in an attitude of prayer to die.”
This account of a woman dying in isolation and poverty in a rooming house reflects the harsh reality of Seattle's transient population in the 1890s. Today, the city continues to grapple with the intersection of housing instability and the lack of social safety nets for its most vulnerable residents.
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